The region is characterised by a reciprocal interplay of infrastructure and landscape. Terms such as artificial and natural seem to have lost the legitimacy of differentiation here.
Innsbruck 2021: Cities are infrastructural networks. Nature brought into the city is allowed to stay in demarcated and clearly defined areas in urban space, but not to unfold. If it exceeds its clearly defined boundaries, it is trimmed. It is only in the unused urban fragments, the abandoned areas of the city, that the infrastructural network experiences a break in its continuity and allows nature to take up space for itself, free from externally controlled determination. Such a break is a moment of instability. If the stability of the prevailing urban fabric is called into question, selective measures can be taken in these individual moments of instability in order to initiate the transformation of the urban fabric and bring the ambivalence of the Tyrolean landscape into the city.
Station area 2021: the station building as a wall, seemingly marking an advanced end of the city. Behind it, a railway landscape: areas removed from human movement, dividing the city into two parts. Infrastructure is no longer an invasive object, but has itself become a landscape in its scaling. The freight station area is the largest abandoned area in the city, an unused space full of transformative potential. The site (Fig. 1), with its impact on the entire urban fabric of the city, is just one of many examples of such large-scale brownfield sites in European cities. These are mostly former infrastructural or industrial areas that have lost their significance and usability. In the example of Innsbruck, the fact that the continuity of the city is broken by this abandoned area in such a way that all qualities of urban life are limited to the ‘front side’, the city centre, is particularly significant. Pradl, on the other hand, located on the deserted ‘back’ of the railway station, is a purely residential and industrial area, abruptly cut off from those urban qualities that a diverse urban fabric needs in order to develop in line with contemporary living requirements.